Illustration, left: detail from Le Coin de la Table (sometimes titled
‘Un coin de la table’), 1872, by Henri Fantin-Latour (1836–1904).
Verlaine and Rimbaud are seated front left.
Other famous poets of the time who had been asked to sit were so angry when they found that Rimbaud had been asked to join them that they refused to take part.
Even the kind and gentle Albert
Mérat (as Starkie calls him) declined, saying that he did not wish to go
down to posterity in the company with that young hooligan Arthur Rimbaud. The
vase of flowers on the right substituted for him; nonentities took the places
of others — standing: E. Bonnier, Émile Blémont, Jean Aicard — sitting: Verlaine, Rimbaud, Léon Valade, Ernest d’Hervilly, Camille
Pelletan. You can see the original in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris,
where the label for the picture identifies Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine by
their surnames only, as I have done here; the others are given both their first
and second names in order to identify them to an uncaring posterity. Moral:
don’t be snippy!

This issue of Jacket is a
co-production with SALT magazine,
an international journal of poetry and poetics, edited by John Kinsella
PO Box 937, Great Wilbraham, Cambridge PDO, CB1 5JX United Kingdom ISSN
1324-7131

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